Critical Essay by Benedict Nightingale

SOURCE: “Harold Pinter/Politics,” in Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama, edited by Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn, The University of Michigan Press, 1990, pp. 129-54.

In the following essay, Nightingale examines Pinter's political commitments and argues that their expression in his later plays lessens the quality of those plays.

Ten or twenty years ago Harold Pinter was the very last British dramatist one would have expected to find publicly crusading against nuclear weapons, state torture, America's domination of the lands to her south, and other actual or supposed ills. The idea that this activism might extend to his plays would have been even more unthinkable.

True, a few alert critics, notably Martin Esslin and Ruby Cohn, detected political resonances in his work, especially his early work; but they knew that these were resonances...